The petrified screen walls, bones, the rough camera movement of universal laws, the strict calculation of light wherein the material, already weary automatons, metals, wrap little by little in the slow loveness which is the almost indistinguishable work of the mould splotches the rust, the rarified space and a hasty clock on my chest.
The image's slowness recalls the car in the garage the suicide with the gas from the exhaust pipe, which means, the vertiginous heart and the slowness of the world darkening in the foggy reels of the smooth crepuscular motors or, in other words, flashes, combustions, delivered at random in the arteries, better saying, the pulsations.
Uncertain radioscopy like us but probably exact in the dosage between shadow and calcium of its architecture millimetrically internal, at last the spectacle turns into the viewer itself and now it dwells the fluidity of blood: every outside image stuck to the frame that has been, from eyeball to eyeball is destroyed.
Texto de Corinne Atlan et Zéno Bianu Tradução de Miguel Patrício
Porque amamos o haiku? Sem dúvida pelo consentimento que suscita em nós, entre o maravilhamento e o mistério. O tempo de uma respiração (um haiku, segundo a regra, não deve ser mais longo do que uma respiração), o poema coincide repentinamente com a nossa exacta intimidade, provocando o mais subtil dos sismos. Sem dúvida também porque ele nos confunde, porque nos faz sair da nossa dobra, rasgando uma fronha sobre o nosso olhar, recordando que a criação tem lugar a cada instante. «Salmo contra o hábito» dizia justamente Henri Pichette a propósito da poesia - "súbito arrebatamento no imprevísivel", responderiam os haikistas que buscam o desconhecido no coração do familiar. Talvez, enfim, porque ele sabe beliscar o coração com ligeireza. Nada de pesado, nada de solene, nada de convencional. Apenas uma tremulação cúmplice. Uma sapiente simplicidade. A espontânea eclosão de uma flor de sentido.
Uma noite no templo - a lua a maior claridade do meu rosto
Bashô
Leiamos. Escutemos esta maneira inimitável de fazer surgir o invisível. Como uma percepção acelarada do instante. Como se a natureza, subitamente, tomasse a palavra no lugar do homem, assemelhando-se a uma extensão dele mesmo e das suas emoções. O poeta contempla a lua (ou será o inverso?) - os seus rostos reflectem-se até se confundirem. Eis o mundo oferecido àquilo que é: um espaço onde se entrelaçam infinitamente tristeza e beleza. Segundo Bashô, um poema acabado deve revelar - ao mesmo tempo - o imutável, a eternidade que nos ultrapassa (fueki) e o fugitivo, o efémero que nos atravessa (ryûko). O haiku treme e cintila como um instante-poema, uma faísca escapada da confrontação permanente entre o presente a eternidade, um minúsculo meteorito de modéstia à escala do cosmos. Ele suspende, como se brincasse, da razão discursiva que usamos como uma muleta - com uma ambição soberana: dizer a realidade tal como ela é, traçar o território de um afinamento pacífico das formas e das sensações.
Defronte do relâmpago - sublime é aquele que não sabe nada!
Bashô
O haikista parece fotografar, gravar (André Breton no "Primeiro Manifesto do Surrealismo" não aconselhava aos poetas a serem «aparelhos de gravação»?) um nada simples, mas cujo relampejar irradia sem cessar. Ele não concebe, ele descobre. Ele mete o foco no ponto que está ali, agora, inesgotável do éfemero - não uma essência, mas uma dinâmica, uma energia. Longe de se servir de qualquer ponto-de-vista, ele procura um poder de visão - um novo ângulo. Quem sabe, no fundo, se o mundo visto por uma borboleta não é mais real do que o nosso, parece perguntar com insistência, um eco da célebre meditação de Tchouang-tseu (1)? Borboletas, libélulas, pulgas, moscas, pirilampos, caracóis, minhocas - esta atenção fornecida ao ínfimo, esta delicadeza face ao mundo e todas as criaturas vivas, princípio budista, se o é, presente também de uma preocupação constante do detalhe, característica da arte japonesa. Quantas cenas observadas, tanto na pintura como em literatura, como uma sebe que se atravessa, ou ampliadas por qualquer zoom? A atenção centra-se num ou dois detalhes, o mesmo que dizer, da totalidade de um conjunto - a parte tornada o todo. Perspectivas esclarecidas organizam-se, primeiro e último plano desenham a geografia iluminadora do haiku. (2)
As montanhas ao longe - reflexo nas pupilas de uma libelinha
Buson
Pois trata-se, ainda e sempre, de encorpar aquilo que é - velando, segundo a fórmula, «o espírito como um espelho». De cuidar-restituir, como um mesmo tempo, esses instantes em que o mundo se faz signo.
Noite sem fim - penso naquilo que virá daqui a mil anos
Shiki
Sem nenhuma dúvida, todo o haikista poderia fazer sua esta definição de Leang-Kiai de Tong-chan, poeta da época Tang: «Chamamos frase morta àquela frase em que a linguagem é ainda linguagem: uma frase viva é aquela onde a linguagem não é mais linguagem.» Arte da elipse e da brevidade, o haiku toma o lado da «frase viva», mas procede por decréscimo, por subtracção - por despojamento. Habitado por uma exigência de expressão absoluta, o haiku desnuda a língua até à sua moela. Para revelar sem discordar. Abordando as palavras pelas palavras, fazendo-as dizer aquilo que elas pareciam não poder dizer, ele traquina sempre nos limites da linguagem. E se ele aparece como uma expressão verdadeira de uma verdadeira vertigem, é sem dúvida porque ele se ocupa a cinzelar sem fim essa pura aporia: transmitir em palavras o silêncio.
Um mundo que sofre sob um manto de flores
Issa
Brevidade, dizíamos. Mesmo dentro dos seus limites, o haiku ocupa-se dos confins. É nesta retenção que a forma da poesia mais densa da história encontra a sua amplitude. A sua humildade - a sua compaixão - fazem toda a sua força. As suas poucas sílabas abrem um espaço de nascença infinita que a leitura malogra em esgotar. Um espaço de pura intensidade mental. Deve-se dizer que o leitor é convocado à sua mais viva, à sua mais verdadeira paleta sensível para completar o poema. Fá-lo ressoar. Como se a metáfora cedesse aqui o passo à ressonância - onda de um seixo de sentido, ricocheteando sobre as águas do silêncio. No seio de um jogo constante entre contradição e expansão, entre finitude e infinitude, entre sístole e diástole, poeta e leitor partilham e abraçam um mesmo espaço. Ao trabalho de contracção do poeta - na sua qualidade de presença vigilante («criar a frieza», precisa Kawahigashi Hekigotô, um dos mestres modernos do género), concentrando, condensando todo o real num só e único instante-tempo - faz eco a percepção expansiva do leitor, atravessado subitamente por um brilho polifónico, uma espécie de momento-haiku, onde ele se reencontrará parte credora. Numa singular troca ecopoética, experiência de escrita e experiência de leitura não são mais separáveis. Existe aqui, no sentido mais forte do termo, uma partilha de estado de espírito. (3) Assim os haikus mais conseguidos podem ser lidos e relidos, numa espécie de exaltação sempre nova. Eles erguem uma espera - para uma reabsorção calorosa. E podemos legitimamente cantar aqui um certo devastador excerto de Malcolm de Chazal:
Tu és rico? Tenho tudo. Já não me possuo mais.
Tais poemas não sobrecarregam nada - sobretudo um sujeito ou um ego -, eles abrem, continuam. Eles não esperam desflorar as coisas, fixando-as, mas aflorá-las (fazê-las aflorar) numa interrogação juvenil - deixá-los flutuar numa continuidade vibrante. Para o leitor atento, eles formam uma lugar de fraternidade com o sabor do mundo, um consentimento luminoso daquilo que existe:
Prepara-te para a morte prepara-te murmuram as cerejeiras em flor
Issa
Poemas um pouco mais do que poemas - ou um pouco menos (Barthes situava-os "na fronteira anterior da linguagem") -, eles quereriam suscitar em nós, pelo uso de um lirismo vigoroso, um sentimento do mundo como milagre. Um sentimento de abertura face à insondabilidade das coisas que parecem ter esquecido, pouco a pouco, a herança filosófica ocidental, governada normalmente por um espírito de distância frente a frente da realidade. Se o haiku é um exercício espiritual, é no sentido em que se aprofunda o spiritus, isto é, o sopro, do mundo em nós. Ele apenas e tão só celebra as pulsações do vivo, sem jamais proibir a impertinência, nem a travessura - residentes na pena e no sofrimento.
Coração branqueado pela chuva carcaça batida pelos ventos!
Bashô
O ser está destinado a se desenlaçar corpo e alma, a submergir no vazio: somos joguetes (mais ou menos lúcidos) desses elementos encadeados, somos essa planície desolada ou o branco dos nossos próprios ossos. Ele não é nada, até à sua mais extrema dissonância, onde residiria o infinito. O despertar? Uma imediatez límpida, sem a maior grandiloquência. Uma imanência pronta a brotar nos lugares mais comuns. Excepto que ele não é nenhum lugar comum. Como se cada coisa na sua dimensão fugitiva revelasse a economia derradeira da natureza.
Na ponta de uma erva, frente ao infinito do céu uma formiga
Hôsai
O haiku propõe uma arte de viver os fosfenos do mundo e do tempo, uma escuta de todas as formas de coincidência. Ele solicita, à sua maneira, um espírito desocupado, um espírito que se deixa habitar. Ele mete em cena um eu-mundo por vezes totalmente implicado e perfeitamente disciplinado, um eu-universo, um corpo, um diapasão do espaço.
Profundo mais profundo ainda nas montanhas azuis
Santôka
Absorvamos estes poemas que rememoram a inquietação rilkiana de «ouvir cantar as coisas». Poemas escritos por loucos de poesia. Não impõe nada, eles oferecem, eles esticam, eles fazem brotar. Trata-se de um "reconhecimento" - eis o sentido mais profundo da palavra "satori". Eles transmitem uma sapiência louca, aplicada em poesia.
Um governador perguntava a Yo-chan (745-828): "Qual é o caminho?" Depois de agitar um braço para cima e depois para baixo, Yo-chan perguntava-lhe: "Compreende?" -Não. -As nuvens estão no céu e a água nos cântaros.
Nada mais, nada menos. Deus? O interior de um vento azul, a magreza de uma mulher no Verão, um sapo que inala uma nuvem, uma peónia que explode. Uma onda, um fluxo, um abandono. Imaginem um universo destravado, solto. Como um terreno de jogo infinito. Uma graçola, revelada em toda a sua nudez risível. Para se fazerem poetas, um Bashô, um Issa não deixarem sempre de praticar a «loucura poética» (fukyo), errância libertária dos gestos e dos olhares. Os seus poemas testemunham sempre uma confiança ilimitada no inesperado - até evocarem, por vezes, a profundidade hilariante de um Groucho Marx.
Através de um peido de cavalo desperto vi pirilampos voar
Issa
O haiku não esquece jamais a dança tremida da parte e do todo. Abrindo um re-encantamento generalizado, ele agradece a vida, sempre que ela se improvisa - de começo a começo. Sugerindo, solicitando - vidros luzentes como cometas, grãos de arroz galácticos - uma solidariedade universal do que vive, apesar da morte, apesar do sofrimento. Há aqui, entre intuição e atenção, um sentimento de pertença à totalidade sensível. Uma estética que é sempre uma ética - uma ética do último amor.
------- Notas: (1) Questionando a realidade da realidade, Tchouang-tseu interroga-se em abismo: «sonhei com uma borboleta, ou fui um sonho da borboleta - a menos que a borboleta tenha sonhado de mim que eu sonhava com ela, ou terei sonhado a borboleta que sonhava de mim que eu sonhava com ela?» (2) Numa passagem do País da Neve, Kawabata ressalta uma abelha agonizada e a Via Láctea, descrita como uma escarpa sem fim, encerrando a terra como uma encosta pura, indecifrável. Trata-se assim, para o ser humano de estar, simultaneamente, «aqui em baixo» e «lá em cima», de tomar lugar simultaneamente nos dois mundos. (3) Este diálogo é o espírito preciso do haiku original (ver «Petite histoire du haiku», pp. 207). Um artista plástico contemporâneo como Akira Arita demonstra melhor a persistência desse lugar singular unindo artista e espectador, quando ele afirma que «a noção de finalizar ou acabar um quadro, não existe», e que ele deixa essa possibilidade e essa responsabilidade ao espectador, «dando-lhes o seu pincel».
The sun rises from the steep cliffs, Sorrow creeps past below the overpass. The place afar. Railway barriers one after the other, The image of a lonely figure. Ah, You're a wanderer.
You came from the past, surpassed the future. Looking for the sense of homesickness that's been long gone. In such a rush, Walking by in sorrow, As in a poem of time. Like killing a snake with a stone. Breaking off a reincarnation, Without the will to conquer loneliness. Ah, more lonely than a demon.
Can you stand the long, cold winter? You didn't believe in anything. What you believe in is rage. Not certain that whether you've ever denied lust, To impeach your so-called lust. The tiresome sorrow that you get when you don't. Hugging and kissing someone gently, not going home. You didn't love anything. You're a lonely man. Ah, the sorrow in the sunset reached the slope, Drifting there, with no purpose.
When can you go home? But there's no home for you. When can you go home? But there's no home for you.
All three statements, above, impart something true and observable about the “real” world. If understood and applied with sympathy to the life and works of Shuji Terayama (1935-1983), they may afford us an expanded appreciation for his accomplishments in tanka.
When poets throw images like this against the wall, what are they trying to do?
my father
then came home alone
with a drenched hat
and a sodden skylark
In Terayama’s case, I think he is playing. It is play that takes him out of himself and back again, little by little building upon his understanding about where and how he fits into the world, how he relates to and feels about it, trying always to get the measurements right in his language. Imagination is his vehicle, the power of the mind to create its own reality out of the stuff of events, objects, and people. He becomes the creator and master, and the senses do his bidding and submit to his choreography: a process of discovery, a game of identities, masks, and metamorphosis.
And since he’s writing it all down, he invites us to join in. We get to experience the world through his imagination, through the poetry that comes out of it. It may not be—to a certainty never can be—the same as being there, in his mind, but it is very close. In the nearness, there is much power and beauty, casting its glow like lamplight on our faces:
inside of me
there is a dark house
where a boy sleeps
with bent knees,
when I polish the lamp
Most readers in English got their first look at Shuji Terayama’s tanka in Ferris Wheel: 101 Modern and Contemporary Tanka (Boston:Cheng & Tsui, 2006), where five of his poems appeared. [1] Who was this evidently brilliant poet, about whom we had heard virtually nothing? His work makes no appearance in Makoto Ueda’s Modern Japanese Tanka (Columbia University Press, 1996), an anthology that generously samples the work of twenty of Japan’s most highly regarded tanka poets, from Yosano Tekkan (1873-1935) to Tawara Michi (b. 1962). He is nowhere to be found in any of the other major anthologies of modern Japanese literature published in English over the last thirty years.
Thanks to Uzawa and Fielden, at last some correction and rehabilitation is possible with the appearance of their new title this past summer from Hokuseido Press, Kaleidoscope: Selected Tanka of Shuji Terayama. [2] The book includes 201 tanka from the four collections Terayama published before he reached the age of thirty: A Book in the Sky (1958), Blood and Wheat (1962), Wasteland on the Table (1962), and Death in the Countryside (1964). “Kaleidoscope” is not a title Terayama himself ever used. I wonder if he would have liked it for this book of his selected poems, meant for reading on shores outside Japan. I think a good poet like Terayama does exactly what a kaleidoscope does not do : puts things into focus, especially in relation to ourselves. It’s a small quibble, and a personal one, but I wish they’d chosen something else.
A section titled “Early Tanka” at the beginning of the book includes over fifty poems written by Terayama during his high school days, before 1957. These tanka make evident what a fast-study Terayama was. With tremendous energy and enthusiasm, and plenty of hubris, too, it appears, he launched himself into creating a unique tanka aesthetic that dumped most of the strictures and constraints of autobiographical, diarist composition and subject matter, placing instead at the center of his work the creations of imaginative expression—what some would assert is the poet’s real work in the first place. Let the diarists and personal journal-keepers attend to making tanka verse— Terayama appears to have wanted no part of that kind of platform for his work.
Finished with tanka before the age of thirty, Terayama’s relatively small oeuvre of poems has made him “. . . still one of the most popular tanka poets in Japan . . .” according to Uzawa in her introductory “The Life of Shuji Terayama.” Is he really that popular? The thickets of Japanese waka and tanka politics and rivalries can be impenetrable to an outsider; here we’ll have to accept the translator’s statement and hope that it is no exaggeration. At least I’m right there beside Uzawa in thinking that Terayama ought to be that popular.
Uzawa and Fielden have worked hard to bring forward a collection of poetry that is intriguing, engaging, frequently amazing. Uzawa continues: “Most tanka poets write tanka based on their own experiences. However, Terayama wrote tanka as fiction. His poems read like scenes from a movie, stage play, or short story. The stories he writes in his tanka are quite different from his real life.” Here is an example of what Uzawa has noted:
my aunt may be
a supporting actor in my life,
the handkerchief
on her palm is pooling
summer rain
This tender and loving portrait of the woman , the aunt, comes entirely out of the summer rain pooling in the handkerchief on her palm. Through imaginative use of language, and through imaginative seeing of correspondences, Terayama’s feelings are objectified so that they might be experienced and understood better, as form and substance, by himself and his readers, rather than encountered as idea or psychological concept. It is an old trick that the greatest poets have long played, and is what sets them apart from makers of mere verse amusements.
Certainly that observable divide—between a poet’s art and that same poet’s life—has validity, in a literal sense, when observed by an objective outsider who stands a few decades away in time and looks from a distance to see what a poet is doing.On the other hand, I think Terayama himself might tell us that the imagination was his real life— and that the life of the imagination, wherein by choice his real self and consciousness existed, is reflected in his tanka, and in his later artistic pursuits as playwright, film-maker, and photographer. I think it’s probable that, for Terayama, almost everything else was uninteresting dross or background noise: it bored him.
This poem, from among his early tanka, reveals the poet’s orientation and attitude:
birds banished
from the sky,
time, beasts
all collected here
in my ark-like toybox
Already dominant here are the associative, Symbolist tendencies of his rapidly maturing work, particularly his use of animals and their imagery as stand-ins for the feelings and passions of his emotional life. The “ark-like” toybox in which this menagerie found life can be interpreted as meaning his own physical body, the birds and beasts therein being representations of his own states of mind-and-heart.
Life was a toybox, and imagination was the key he would use to open it up and express what he found there throughout his brief tanka career. The image of the toybox as being “ark-like” is important, conveying his intention as artist to take refuge in a vessel of his own creation (a most unlikely Noah) and to safely transfer to another place, through art, all that he wanted to take with him from time and life—his experience “all collected here.” Not God in Heaven but his own imagination told him why and how.
His attitude toward poetry is even more explicit in this later poem, from A Book in the Sky :
lying down
in the attic,
where angry waves
sound very close,
I make poetry my power
His location “in the attic” expresses his sense of isolation and apartness, the attic being a simple yet powerful metaphor for the confinements the artistic consciousness must be aware of and deal with every day, relegated to living in a space probably not meant for habitation, above and apart from the common living areas of the house. Both worlds are side-by-side, yet apart. Out of the tension between them, out of those angry waves to which he listens “very close”, Terayama draws his power and his reason for being. There is no bitterness here, but a kind of secret glee, all the more believable because the circumstances in which he places his Poet as Creator (himself) are so plain and un-extraordinary: after all, literally, he is a young man living in an attic. The poem begs the question, at that literal level, “What power could he be talking about?” The glee I sense here is in the secret knowledge Terayama has of himself, as the poet-creator, using that power within the same world that asks that question of him. He answers that question in his own way: with a poem.
Significantly—for no word is wasted, and none are used as filler to flesh out a line—“time” is mentioned on the list of things in his toybox. Here is an example of how he uses and regards time:
inside the orchard
there is tomorrow
I draw it
pressing my chest hard
against the wooden fence
The temporal is also a dimension with which Terayama plays, along with geography and place, the view from the window, the food on the plate, the street into town, and all the impediments of earthly life that we mortals, made of lesser tissue, accept as givens and just deal with. Memories of the past are embodied in the present, in tropes that permit us to see, hear, and smell them:
in my receding
memories
towns and days are
whispering
like flower petals
Such poems annihilate time, turning it into flower petals. This is what Emerson was talking about when he wrote that “All thinking is analogizing . . . the endless passing of one element into new forms, the incessant metamorphosis” which “explains the rank the imagination holds in our catalogue of mental powers . . . the poet accounts all productions and changes of Nature as the nouns of language, uses them representationally . . . “ [3]
Terayama’s many poems about his father are especially moving and, I think, offer multi-leveled examples of how he made imagination the engine of his art—the source and substance of his diary notes, so to speak. Here are a few:
this lamp is
the only thing
my dead father left ---
a winter fly rests
on my cheek
countable
as part of my father’s estate
this wintry sunset
is visible
from every ridge
an apparition
when I’m napping
in my overcoat ---
I can only think
it’s my father’s spirit
When we encounter spirit and coat again, later, can it possibly be the same spirit, the same coat?
whose evil spirit?
suddenly I feel cold
when I pass
in front of
a hung coat
Terayama’s feelings toward his father are often ambiguous, and sometimes fearful, uncertain, uncomfortable. Yet there is powerful beauty and expressiveness in the emptiness, the literal dispossession, of that hanging coat. He has many poems featuring his father, including the first poem cited in this essay; he did not bury his father and, actually, barely knew him. His father was killed in combat in Indonesia in World War Two, when Shuji was very young. The moody, somewhat recessive tones of these poems are among Terayama’s most distinctive trademarks. Here are two more, on different subjects:
behind a dog
going to hide
his bone
I walk in
the dead grass
let’s reflect
my dead spirit
in the winter well
since I have nothing
to throw there
Terayama wrote poems about being saddened by the thought of his dead mother while she remained quite alive in a nearby town:
I gently comb
the turtledove
with my dead mother’s
scarlet comb ---
its down keeps falling out
Such a poem would have interested William Empson, who labored so long and hard to explain how the best poetry maximizes—he called it “a multiplicity of associations”—the denotative and connotative meanings of words, which meanings the poet holds in tension, careful not to go too far in either direction, but occupying the entire scale of possibilities. [4]
Sure, poetry is one thing, life is another. But about making things up, this poem summarizes in vivid concreteness his untroubled point of view:
while an ant
toiled from the dahlia
to the ash tray
I was forming
a beautiful lie
He is being ironic, and sounding over-confident here, perhaps, but we get the point. In beauty so formed, there is no lie.
Terayama is a poet capable of showing us the overlapping of things outside with ideas and emotions inside. Even such abstractions as “freedom” he handles with ease:
it’s written
on the dirty wall
of the subway,
it’s forgotten, like an old wound:
freedom
the house mouse
has ten metres
of freedom —
I commune with
its wild eyes
Terayama’s poetry is not, of course, a purely invented reality. After all, he draws all his material from human experience. He practiced a deep and abiding empathy, about which he wrote often:
this wind
carrying carrot seeds
connects
the orphan,
sunset, and me
Ordinary life is still the subject matter but imagination of Terayama’s calibre, combined with and enabled by his natural empathic powers, is needed to make it soar, fully-winged, into the human record as literature.
After reading his poems in this marvelous, fascinating book, it’s perhaps easier to understand how, at about age 30, Terayama left tanka and devoted the remainder of his short life to pursuing and seducing the wild and often chaotic world of surrealist and noir film-making, directing, and scripting. He involved himself deeply in the punk- and acid- rock popular subcultures of 60s and 70s urban Japan, and never emerged a poet again. He died at age 47 of cirrhosis of the liver, a degenerative illness that appears to have plagued him for most of his adult life, requiring long periods of hospitalization. There’s plenty of reason to wish that he’d somehow continued to write tanka up to the last.
Hokuseido Press is to be congratulated for this commemorative edition on the 25 th anniversary of Shuji Terayama’s death. The English translations are accompanied by the original Japanese, which permits careful scrutiny of the translators’ versions. The poems are presented one, two or three to a page on heavy, glossy paper, festooned with a tsunami of what appears to be clip-art images and a miscellany of photographs and engraved images, ranging in subject from grim urban scenes to recumbent, half-naked Victorian ladies. The multifarious wildness and incoherence of it all is something, I think, Terayama would have liked very much, even though sometimes it can be distracting, or feel out of key with the poetry on the page. I got used to it . . . and began to appreciate the sly humor.
For Shuji Terayama, poetry was a young man’s passion, apparently, and he burned out on it. Or perhaps the passion endured and Terayama merely chose different venues to exercise and express it. The book’s last poem, from his last collection, Death in the Countryside , is this one:
at the dark side
of the globe
am I,
alone
and pale of face
In poetry, as Terayama practiced it, the work of the imagination is not to give a dweeb the idea he is Superman, but to lead a person to understand one’s self and the world better, practically and spiritually, and to take delight in the knowledge when conveyed by language in poetic form.
The early death we have to live with and regret; it is the life that is really commemorated here, and it comes with Terayama’s own last self-portrait in tanka. Haunting, isn’t it?
in Modern English Tanka, Volume III, Nº 1
September 2008
Notes:
1. Ferris Wheel earned for its translators, Kozue Uzawa and Amelia Fielden, the 2007 Donald Keene Translation Award for Japanese Literature.
2. Kaleidoscope: Selected Tanka of Shuji Terayama , translated by Kozue Uzawa and Amelia Fielden. (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 2008). 144 pages, 6” x 8”, hardcover; glossy, thick paper, heavily illustrated; ISBN 978-4-590-01241-4, $20 US plus postage. Available through any Kinokuniya bookstore; in North America through Kozue Uzawa at uzawa@shaw.ca, and in Australia/New Zealand through Amelia Fielden at anafielden@hotmail.com
3. From “Poetry and Imagination” by Ralph Waldo Emerson [essay, 1872].
4. For a classic, exhaustive study of this topic, see Seven Types of Ambiguity by William Empson (1930) or, in briefer treatment, Allen Tate’s essay “Tension in Poetry.”
(Sansho Dayu, 1954)
I.
(Anma to Onna, 1938)
(Yaju Shisubeshi, 1980)
(Bara no Soretsu, 1969)
